"And the future," answered my mother, "has a way of making plans for us instead."
"It would seem so," replied my father, with a laugh. "I am an unlucky beggar, Maggie. I dropped all your money as well as my own down that wretched mine."
"It was the will--it was Fate, or whatever you call it," said my mother.
"You could not help that, Luke."
"If only that d.a.m.ned pump hadn"t jambed," said my father.
"Do you remember that Mrs. Tharand?" asked my mother.
"Yes, what of her?"
"A worldly woman, I always thought her. She called on me the morning we were leaving; I don"t think you saw her. "I"ve been through more worries than you would think, to look at me," she said to me, laughing. I"ve always remembered her words: "and of all the troubles that come to us in this world, believe me, Mrs. Kelver, money troubles are the easiest to bear.""
"I wish I could think so," said my father.
"She rather irritated me at the time," continued my mother. "I thought it one of those commonplaces with which we console ourselves for other people"s misfortunes. But now I know she spoke the truth."
There was silence between them for awhile. Then said my father in a cheery tone:
"I"ve broken with old Hasluck."
"I thought you would be compelled to sooner or later," answered my mother.
"Hasluck," exclaimed my father, with sudden vehemence, "is little better than a thief; I told him so."
"What did he say?" asked my mother.
"Laughed, and said that was better than some people."
My father laughed himself.
I wish to do the memory of Noel Hasluck no injustice. Ever was he a kind friend to me; not only then, but in later years, when, having come to learn that kindness is rarer in the world than I had dreamt, I was glad of it. Added to which, if only for Barbara"s sake, I would prefer to write of him throughout in terms of praise. Yet even were his good-tempered, thick-skinned ghost (and unless it were good-tempered and thick-skinned it would be no true ghost of old Noel Hasluck) to be reading over my shoulder the words as I write them down, I think it would agree with me--I do not think it would be offended with me (for ever in his life he was an admirer and a lover of the Truth, being one of those good fighters capable of respecting even his foe, his enemy, against whom from ten to four, occasionally a little later, he fought right valiantly) for saying that of all the men who go down into the City each day in a cab or "bus or train, he was perhaps one of the most unprincipled: and whether that be saying much or little I leave to those with more knowledge to decide.
To do others, as it was his conviction, right or wrong, that they would do him if ever he gave them half a chance, was his notion of "business;"
and in most of his transactions he was successful. "I play a game,"
he would argue, "where cheating is the rule. Nine out of every ten men round the table are sharpers like myself, and the tenth man is a fool who has no business to be there. We prey upon each other, and the cutest of us is the winner."
"But the innocent people, lured by your fine promises," I ventured once to suggest to him, "the widows and the orphans?"
"My dear lad," he said, with a laugh, laying his fat hand upon my shoulder, "I remember one of your widows writing me a pathetic letter about some shares she had taken in a Silver Company of mine. Lord knows where the mine is now--somewhere in Spain, I think. It looked as though all her savings were gone. She had an only son, and it was nearly all they possessed in the world, etc., etc.--you know the sort of thing.
Well, I did what I"ve often been numskull enough to do in similar cases, wrote and offered to buy her out at par. A week later she answered, thanking me, but saying it did not matter. There had occurred a momentary rise, and she had sold out at a profit--to her own brother-in-law, as I discovered, happening to come across the transfers.
You can find widows and orphans round the Monte Carlo card tables, if you like to look for them; they are no more deserving of consideration than the rest of the crowd. Besides, if it comes to that, I"m an orphan myself;" and he laughed again, one of his deep, hearty, honest laughs.
No one ever possessed a laugh more suggestive in its every cadence of simple, transparent honesty. He used to say himself it was worth thousands to him.
Better from the Moralists" point of view had such a man been an out-and-out rogue. Then might one have pointed, crying: "Behold: Dishonesty, as you will observe in the person of our awful example, to be hated, needs but to be seen." But the duty of the Chronicler is to bear witness to what he knows, leaving Truth with the whole case before her to sum up and direct the verdict. In the City, old Hasluck had a bad reputation and deserved it; in Stoke-Newington--then a green suburb, containing many fine old houses, standing in great wooded gardens--he was loved and respected. In his business, he was a man void of all moral sense, without bowels of compa.s.sion for any living thing; in retirement, a man with a strong sense of duty and a fine regard for the rights and feelings of others, never happier than when planning to help or give pleasure. In his office, he would have robbed his own mother. At home, he would have spent his last penny to add to her happiness or comfort. I make no attempt to explain. I only know that such men do exist, and that Hasluck was one of them. One avoids difficulties by dismissing them as a product of our curiously complex civilisation--a convenient phrase; let us hope the recording angel may be equally impressed by it.
Casting about for some reason of excuse to myself for my liking of him, I hit upon the expedient of regarding him as a modern Robin Hood, whom we are taught to admire without shame, a Robin Hood up to date, adapted to the changed conditions of modern environment; making his living relieving the rich; taking pleasure relieving the poor.
"What will you do?" asked my mother.
"I shall have to give up the office," answered my father. "Without him there"s not enough to keep it going. He was quite good-tempered about the matter--offered to divide the work, letting me retain the straightforward portion for whatever that might be worth. But I declined. Now I know, I feel I would rather have nothing more to do with him."
"I think you were quite right," agreed my mother.
"What I blame myself for," said my father, "is that I didn"t see through him before. Of course he has been making a mere tool of me from the beginning. I ought to have seen through him. Why didn"t I?"
They discussed the future, or, rather, my father discussed, my mother listening in silence, stealing a puzzled look at him from time to time, as though there were something she could not understand.
He would take a situation in the City. One had been offered him. It might sound poor, but it would be a steady income on which we must contrive to live. The little money he had saved must be kept for investments--nothing speculative--judicious "dealings," by means of which a cool, clear-headed man could soon acc.u.mulate capital. Here the training acquired by working for old Hasluck would serve him well. One man my father knew--quite a dull, commonplace man--starting a few years ago with only a few hundreds, was now worth tens of thousands. Foresight was the necessary qualification. You watched the "tendency" of things.
So often had my father said to himself: "This is going to be a big thing. That other, it is no good," and in every instance his prognostications had been verified. He had "felt it;" some men had that gift. Now was the time to use it for practical purposes.
"Here," said my father, breaking off, and casting an approving eye upon the surrounding scenery, "would be a pleasant place to end one"s days.
The house you had was very pretty and you liked it. We might enlarge it, the drawing-room might be thrown out--perhaps another wing." I felt that our good fortune as from this day was at last established.
But my mother had been listening with growing impatience, her puzzled glances giving place gradually to flashes of anger; and now she turned her face full upon him, her question written plainly thereon, demanding answer.
Some idea of it I had even then, watching her; and since I have come to read it word for word: "But that woman--that woman that loves you, that you love. Ah, I know--why do you play with me? She is rich. With her your life will be smooth. And the boy--it will be better far for him.
Cannot you three wait a little longer? What more can I do? Cannot you see that I am surely dying--dying as quickly as I can--dying as that poor creature your friend once told us of; knowing it was the only thing she could do for those she loved. Be honest with me: I am no longer jealous. All that is past: a man is ever younger than a woman, and a man changes. I do not blame you. It is for the best. She and I have talked; it is far better so. Only be honest with me, or at least silent. Will you not honour me enough for even that?"
My father did not answer, having that to speak of that put my mother"s question out of her mind for all time; so that until the end no word concerning that other woman pa.s.sed again between them. Twenty years later, nearly, I myself happened to meet her, and then long physical suffering had chased the wantonness away for ever from the pain-worn mouth; but in that hour of waning voices, as some trouble of the fretful day when evening falls, so she faded from their life; and if even the remembrance of her returned at times to either of them, I think it must have been in those moments when, for no seeming reason, shyly their hands sought one another.
So the truth of the sad ado--how far my mother"s suspicions wronged my father; for the eye of jealousy (and what loving woman ever lived that was not jealous?) has its optic nerve terminating not in the brain but in the heart, which was not constructed for the reception of true vision--I never knew. Later, long after the curtain of green earth had been rolled down upon the players, I spoke once on the matter with Doctor Hal, who must have seen something of the play and with more understanding eyes than mine, and who thereupon delivered to me a short lecture on life in general, a performance at which he excelled.
"Flee from temptation and pray that you may be delivered from evil,"
shouted the Doctor--(his was not the Socratic method)--"but remember this: that as sure as the sparks fly upward there will come a time when, however fast you run, you will be overtaken--cornered--no one to deliver you but yourself--the G.o.ds sitting round interested. It is a grim fight, for the Thing, you may be sure, has chosen its right moment. And every woman in the world will sympathise with you and be just to you, not even despising you should you be overcome; for however they may talk, every woman in the world knows that male and female cannot be judged by the same standard. To woman, Nature and the Law speak with one voice: "Sin not, lest you be cursed of your s.e.x!" It is no law of man: it is the law of creation. When the woman sins, she sins not only against her conscience, but against her every instinct. But to the man Nature whispers: "Yield." It is the Law alone that holds him back. Therefore every woman in the world, knowing this, will be just to you--every woman in the world but one--the woman that loves you. From her, hope for no sympathy, hope for no justice."
"Then you think--" I began.
"I think," said the Doctor, "that your father loved your mother devotedly; but he was one of those fighters that for the first half-dozen rounds or so cause their backers much anxiety. It is a dangerous method."
"Then you think my mother--"
"I think your mother was a good woman, Paul; and the good woman will never be satisfied with man till the Lord lets her take him to pieces and put him together herself."
My father had been pacing to and fro the tiny platform. Now he came to a halt opposite my mother, placing his hands upon her shoulders.
"I want you to help me, Maggie--help me to be brave. I have only a year or two longer to live, and there"s a lot to be done in that time."
Slowly the anger died out of my mother"s face.
"You remember that fall I had when the cage broke," my father went on.
"Andrews, as you know, feared from the first it might lead to that. But I always laughed at him."
"How long have you known?" my mother asked.
"Oh, about six months. I felt it at the beginning of the year, but I didn"t say anything to Washburn till a month later. I thought it might be only fancy."
"And he is sure?"